As a followup to the "Create AJAX Server Controls using the ScriptControl base class" post I wrote a couple weeks ago, I've decided to write on how to create ASP.NET AJAX Extender Controls using the ExtenderControl base class in ASP.NET 3.5. There is already an article titled "Adding ASP.NET AJAX Client Behaviors to Web Server Controls" in MSDN, but it doesn't show all the code involved in creating Extender Controls, especially the JavaScript code.
What is an... [More]

In Windows XP I used the Virtual CD-ROM Control Panel Utility from Microsoft to mount ISO images to virtual drive letters, but surely Microsoft has built this functionality into Windows Vista, right? Wrong. It would be nice, but they haven't built this into the OS yet. I hope they do in the next release. Well, this utility doesn't work under Windows Vista. I thought I was out of luck, but a quick search revealed a new option to try.
The new utility I found to mount ISO images under Windows Vist... [More]

A couple weeks ago, while attending the Heros Happen Here launch event in Milwaukee, I ran into Larry Clarkin who is co-host of The Thirsty Developer, and we recorded The Virtual Earth Edition episode that he just released today. In the podcast, I talk about how I got into Virtual Earth development, and give a good overview of the Virtual Earth product, among other things VE related, including the Virtual Earth JavaScript Intellisense Helper and my Web.Maps.VE product.
Listen here: The Thir... [More]

I just listened to episode #344 of DotNetRocks, that was released last week. This episode is on the topic of Building Communities, and the benefits of user groups. Normally each episode is very informative and top notch, but this episode is really rather interesting. Even though this is really not so much tech related, I really encourage anyone interested in user groups and dev/tech communities to take a listen.
Building Communities at Dallas TechFest

I've been playing around with Silverlight 2 Beta 1 alot lately, and one of the areas I've been focusing on is interoperability with JavaScript and the DOM. Here's a technique I've found that allows you to inject JavaScript into the page from within your Silverlight application. This example also starts with the idea that the JavaScript you are going to inject is stored as an Embedded Resource within your Silverlight Application.
Step 1: Create your JavaScript (.js) file and... [More]

A while back I won a free license for JetBrains ReSharper v3.1 at one of the monthly WI .NET Users Group meetings. Today, I finally got around to installing it to check it out.
I found some of the code hightlighting/outlining features to be pretty neat, but.... But, I experienced a 1/2 to 1 second lag for Visual Studio 2008 to do anything after I installed ReSharper. This lag was quite an annoyance. So, consiquentially, I uninstalled ReSharper to get my VS performance back.
I... [More]

A couple months ago I blogged about the fact that using Virtual Earth and ASP.NET AJAX together on the same page caused errors in Safari. There is good new to report back, the latest update to Virtual Earth has fixed this issue. In fact Virtual Earth v6.1 actually includes much better Safari support that previous versions; it actually works correctly in Safari. I found this to be especially helpful since I can now support Safari with my Web.Maps.VE product.
What's the catch? I can't... [More]

I just found that AMD has a tool titled "AMD-V Technology and Microsoft Hyper-V System Compatibility Check Utility". You can run this tool on Windows Vista or Windows Server 2008 (make sure you run it with elevated privileges) to see if your hardware combination of AMD Processor and Motherboard support Hyper-V.
I guess this would have saved me from the trouble of installing Win 2008 with Hyper-V just to figure out that my AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+ supports Hyper-V, but my motherboard doesn't.
I r... [More]

Microsoft just RTM'd Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5 last November and launched them in February. And, their already releasing a Service Pack? What could they possibly have to all fix in a Service Pack this soon? Well, actually they aren't just fixing stuff; they are adding a huge amount of functionality too. ScottGu has a long post about what's all in it here. I'm thinking that .NET 3.5 needed to ship, so they took out everything that just wasn't quite all the way there and are including it in ... [More]

I've been doing a lot with ASP.NET AJAX for almost 2 years now, including my Web.Maps.VE product. So, I've decided to spread some of my knowledge in this area by writing up some articles on things that I've learned and figured out. As a note, since .NET 3.5 is the "latest and greatest" version of the framework out at the time of this writing, this article targets .NET 3.5. This article also assumes you have a basic understanding of ASP.NET AJAX and JavaScript. What is ScriptControl... [More]

It's been forever since I posted anything about Mono, but this stuff deserves some attention. Mono's Winforms 2.0 is now API Complete Yesterday, it was announced that the System.Windows.Forms support in Mono (an open source implementation of the .NET Framework targeting Linux, MacOS, Windows, etc.) has finally reached a state of being API complete. This means the public API for WinForms in Mono is exactly the same as in .NET; with a total of 12,776 methods! The first check-in of WinForms occur... [More]

I used virtualization through VirtualPC 2007 on this computer, an Athlon 64 X2 4200+ with a Gigabyte GA-M55SLI-S4 motherboard, and it worked perfectly. The Athlon 64 X2 even support Hardware-Assisted Virtualization, so things actually run pretty smooth.
Now I've upgraded to Windows Server 2008 so I can run virtual machines with the new Hyper-V (RC0), but when I try to start any virtual machine it gives me an error saying "The virtual machine could not be starte... [More]

Two days ago, May 9th, I attended the {Heroes Happen Here} launch event for VS'08, SQL Server '08 and Windows Server '08 in Milwaukee. There was alot of really great content shown off, and we all got to take away some free software, plus the event was free to attend.
I learned about new technologies like Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V and SoftGrid (which look very interesting, by the way), and I had the chance to talk to some really great people from the .NET developer c... [More]

This example demonstrates the ability to restrict the viewable area (and impose map boundaries) of a Virtual Earth map to be within a specified distance from the maps original center point (at time of initial load), and restrict to a maximum zoom level.
Why might you want to do this? There are times when you may want to restrict your users from possibly getting "lost" when viewing your data on a map. Also, you may want to restrict the user from panning around the globe in an... [More]